Collected Work

Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics

With Petroforms, Helen Kapstein undertakes close readings of a range of Nigerian aesthetic forms: short stories, romance novels, documentary film, the “Nollywood” film industry, fine art sculpture, and poetry. She uses these forms to argue that the demands of paying attention to petroleum extraction, production, consumption, and distribution in the creation of resource fictions must necessarily alter and affect conventional forms and structures. What results is a new set of genre-bending forms, like documentary film that we can read as horror, in response to the forceful and fluid demands of the petroleum industry and its master narrative.

“‘¡Esto No Sale de la Nada!’: AgitArte’s Radical Infrastructures of Feeling”

Puerto Rican politics is rapidly changing, with growing opposition to colonialism reflected at the ballot box, and moments of wider acceptance of confrontational tactics on the streets—including the 2019 Uprising that unseated then-governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. For many, the protests seemed to “come out of nowhere”: a new, generational phenomenon, “auto-convened” if not spontaneous. Even historically-minded observers struggle to find significant precedents dating back more than ten years. In contrast, my research among veteran activists reveals a longer trajectory of sustained agitational work around many of the issues voiced during the Uprising. Drawing on my conversations with key members of AgitArte, a Santurce-based radical arts collective founded in Massachusetts in 1997, I show how, during the two decades leading to the Uprising, this and other groups reinvented and mobilized much older radical repertoires to challenge the prevailing emotional habitus. When, in the summer of 2019, the legitimacy of the colonial elite became temporarily unmoored in the wake of disaster and corruption scandals, confrontational tactics and their related emotional registers were immediately available and read as appropriate by many among the disaffected—surfacing seemingly “out of nowhere.”

Nature Swapped and Nature Lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

“‘A More Colorful Picture of my Own Vision’: Expansive Learning in Puerto Rico’s Student Anti-Austerity Movement”

Social movement scholars have long been aware of leadership competition or ‘factionalism’ as one of the mechanisms within the longer process of polarization. As such, competition is often discussed as a harbinger of demobilization, and rarely in the context of movement emergence or growth. In turn, education scholars have examined social movement learning primarily as a cognitive process of identity formation, with rare and oblique references to the literature on movement dynamics. The first phase of the 2010–2011 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is a useful counterintuitive case for re-examining these conventional wisdoms, as existing studies and first-hand accounts suggest a pattern of intimate connections between factional competition and movement learning. In this article, I propose Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an alternative framework for analyzing that sequence. By recasting competition and other movement dynamics as aspects of the internal contradictions of nested activity systems, themselves crucial to the emergent process of expansive learning, CHAT may help bridge the gap between fields and approaches.

The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures

The Right to Nature explores the differing experiences of a number of environmental-social movements and struggles from the point of view of both activists and academics. This collection attempts to both document the social-ecological impacts of neoliberal attempts to exploit non-human nature in the post-crisis context and to analyse the opposition of emerging environmental movements and their demands for a radically different production of nature based on social needs and environmental justice. It also provides a necessary space for the exchange of ideas and experiences between academics and activists and aims to motivate further academic-activist collaborations around alternative and counter-hegemonic re-thinking of environmental politics.

“Biodiversity Offsetting and the Production of ‘Equivalent Natures’: A Marxist Critique”

In this paper we explore the logic of biodiversity offsetting, focusing on its core promise: the production of ‘equivalent natures’. We show how the construction of equivalence unravels the environmental contradictions of capitalism by exploring how and why it is achieved, and its profound implications for nature-society dialectics. We focus on the construction of an ecological equivalence between ecosystems, the construction of ecological credits that are considered equivalent in monetary terms, and, finally, the construction of an equivalence between places. The existing critical literature, in some cases implicitly and unwittingly, assumes that biodiversity offsetting creates value. In contrast to this argument, we apply Marx’s labour theory of value to conclude that in the majority of instances offsetting does not create value, rather it is an instance of rent. We also draw on Marxist analyses on the production of nature and place to show that biodiversity offsetting radically rescripts nature as placeless, obscuring the fact that it facilitates the production of space, place, and nature according to the interests of capital while emphasizing that at the core of offsetting lie social struggles over rights and access to land and nature. Biodiversity offsetting’s dystopian vision for the future makes it an important focus for all critical scholars seeking to understand and challenge the contradictions of the capitalist production of nature.

“Riding the Perennial Gale: Working-Class Puerto Ricans and the Involution of Colonial Capitalism”

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, deepening an already dire economic situation and amplifying an ongoing wave of out-migration. In the age of permanent man-made climate change, hurricanes, like extended economic crises, are “big events” produced by the capitalist despoiling of nature and labor, further exposing the dispossessed and displaced to structural violence. A colony of the USA since 1898, perhaps Puerto Rico has now once again “changed forever,” as the popular belief goes in the wake of Maria. If so, these changes will continually be experienced and enacted differently by subjects unevenly positioned in terms of unequal relationships of power and privilege. I propose an empirically informed research orientation that examines the situation of contemporary working-class Puerto Ricans in terms of their strategic responses to the involution of colonial capitalism. As a dimension of social life, working-classness is not contracting but expanding, in the context of an ongoing “debt crisis” better understood in terms of the self-consumption, or involution, of the modality of colonial capitalism established in Puerto Rico in the 1940s. In this light, strategic actions of working-class Puerto Ricans such as migration, informal labor, and subsistence/domestic production are not evidence of alternate modes of being, but part of the very conditions of working-classness today. I conclude by briefly identifying three areas for future research to flesh out the proposed orientation, focusing in the immediate term on responses to Maria by working-class communities in the island and the diaspora, in interaction with local and US elites.

“From Historical Chains to Derivative Futures: Title Registries as Time Machines”

For centuries, transferring ownership of land under common law was a slow, complex process requiring the construction of a chain of paper deeds evidencing multiple decades of prior possession. In 1858, colonist Robert Torrens developed a new system for the transfer of land in South Australia, where the land was understood by colonial powers as ‘new’ and without history. With the intention of making land a liquid asset, Torrens’ system of title registration shifted the legal basis of title from a history of prior possession to a singular act of registration. Analysing the structure and effects of title registration, engaging with interdisciplinary work on time, and taking H.G Wells’ iconic time travel novella as a point of departure, I argue that title registries can usefully be understood as time machines. Like the machine H.G Wells imagined, title registries use fiction to facilitate fantastical journeys in which the subject is radically temporally dislocated from the material constraints of history. As with time machines, it tends to be a transcendental white male subject who is most likely to survive this dislocation. While based on fiction, the impacts of title registries are very much real, facilitating humanity’s arrival at racist, dystopic landscapes in the here and now.

“Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage and the Aesthetics of Poverty”

This essay focuses on Brazilian-American artist Vik Muniz's 2008 Pictures of Garbage and the pendant 2010 documentary on their making, Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker. Muniz enlists a group of Brazilian garbage pickers as subjects and participants in the construction of their own portraits, using garbage picked from a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro. The use of garbage as a material draws attention to global patterns of exploitation that produce both the waste itself and the poverty of the garbage pickers. However, this essay argues that Muniz's social aims are undermined by formal incoherences within the portraits and their subsequent recommodification on the global art market. Using Michael Fried's theories, the essay identifies a tension in Pictures of Garbage between the theatricality of the subjects' poses, drawn from canonical European paintings, and the absorptive qualities of the garbage itself. This dissonance reflects Muniz's own split position as a cosmopolitan global artist compelled to represent Brazilian identity through associations with base materiality.

“Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration”

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of “clean,” fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for “curing” titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive “curtain” and “mirror,” which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race.

“Carceral Conservationism: Contested Landscapes and Technologies of Dispossession at Ka‘ena Point, Hawai‘i”

This essay analytically links two fences in Hawai‘i into a genealogy of military occupation. The two fences are not linked spatially, and they differ: the US military encloses Mākua for war preparation, while the State of Hawai‘i constructed the fence at Ka‘ena for a wildlife reserve, producing a space amenable to tourism. Nevertheless, both fences interrupt, manage, and control land-based relationships to reconsolidate and legitimize state authority in the face of powerful grassroots claims to land. Carceral conservationism describes the territorial compromise between grassroots efforts for environmental self-determination and state imperatives to control land and natural resources.

“Crude Fictions: How New Nigerian Short Stories Sabotage Big Oil’s Master Narrative”

New Nigerian short stories, more easily available to readers than ever before, call into question the dominant discourse around oil production nationally and internationally as they depict the complex, lived reality of a resource-rich country riven by corruption, greed, and poverty. The struggle over oil resources and rights regularly involves acts of sabotage and because of their content, their form, and their distribution, the stories themselves can be considered as small acts of sabotage. The stories’ formal qualities - or lack thereof - reflect the circumstances of their production as a tertiary by-product of sabotage. Like the material by-product, the crude oil to be distributed as part of an informal economy, these stories are unrefined. This textual output, like that commodity form, is more quickly available, less constrained by production, less costly for being raw or unprocessed, and more willfully destructive of disciplinary institutions, corporate, national, and literary.